Offline apps with Google Gears
At JavaPolis '07 it was all about RIA's. A lot of focus on Adobe's Flex and Sun's JavaFX and their ability to run applications offline and outside the browser. But there was also a very good talk on Google Gears, which is Google's initiative to make web-apps available offline. Big difference with Adobe and Sun is that a Gears-app doesn't run outside the browser. Gears achieves the goal of making a web-app available offline through the use of javascript API's.
Gears provides three core modules:
- LocalServer - this module allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally, without a network connection.
- Database - this module provides browser-local relational data storage to your JavaScript web application. Google Gears uses the open source SQLite database system.
- WorkerPool - this module allows web applications to run JavaScript code in the background (such as the code that synchronizes data between your server and users' computers), without blocking the main page's script execution. In fact, this brings multithreading to the browser.